Financing Volunteer Free Software Projects
Problems and Strategies

Benjamin Mako Hill

mako@debian.org

http://mako.yukidoke.org

Debian Project

Software in the Public Interest

Overview

Volunteerism is great!

Funding volunteer-based organizations is problematic

Solving these problems

No-Risk solutions

Low-Risk solutions

Strategic Risk Taking

What I mean by “Volunteer Organization”

Why volunteer organizations are great:

“Free” vs “Freed” / “Open Source” vs “Open Sourced”

Institutional independence

Limited resources

Volunteer Organizations are Great!

Dangers of Funding Volunteers

“The love of money is the root of all evil.”

New Testament St. Paul, in 1 Timothy, 6:10

Paid labor “crowds out” volunteers

Transparency decreases

The nature of the product changes

When the volunteer nature goes, so do all the benefits

Dangers of Funding Volunteers (Examples)

Lessons from athletic Norweigans

Lessons from less athletic hackers

The X Consortium

Mozilla

No-Risk Solutions

No-Risk Solutions

=

Low-Risk Solutions

Strategic Risks

Transparency

Fig 10.1: Photograph of Transparency

Outside Organizations

Summary^H^H^H Messages to Funders

Many benefits of the free development model are tied to volunteers

Think hard before you pay coders

Always stay critical, stay creative, and stay transparent

2004-06-03T08:52:33